An App for Gay Travelers That Focuses on the Social

For gay travelers, a GPS-enabled dating app can prove quite useful when away from home. Land in Miami or Madrid, fire up Scruff or Grindr and, voilà, immediately find a bunch of guys in the area who are available for dates or casual hookups. But with its latest update, soon to be released, Scruff is more fully incorporating travel with the introduction of a feature called Scruff Venture.

Soon, when one of Scruff’s eight million users taps on Venture, a list of two dozen cities from New York to Taipei, Taiwan, will come up (more cities are to be added). Choose Sydney, Australia, and users will find not only profiles of locals who are online and nearby, which was always easy enough to do, but also others currently visiting, people who will be visiting the city soon, coming events of interest and even “ambassadors” — Scruff users who are residents of that city and have volunteered to be a resource for visitors, providing tourist tips and advice.

“We’ve found that gay men travel in a different way than maybe a typical straight couple or straight traveler,” said Eric Silverberg, one of Scruff’s founders (Johnny Skandros is the other), and its chief executive. “Gay guys are just more social when they go to a new city.”

In order to help foster that social spirit, users can set up their own trips in advance and make contact with people in a city before they visit, or with others who will be visiting at the same time. So if a traveler is planning to be in Toronto next month, he can make that known on the app, and others who search on the Toronto page between now and then will see the traveler listed under a “visiting soon” section of that page. If a traveler is really outgoing, he might find someone willing to share a hotel room or Airbnb, thereby saving money and having a buddy in place before arrival. Venture even allows users who have their own listings on Airbnb or VRBO to include those on the app.

“Scruff Venture for us is a way to broaden the uses for Scruff and appeal to a bigger demographic of gay men,” Mr. Silverberg said. Because Scruff Venture represents an expansion into the realm of travel, he said, the app will prove useful in new ways and provide added value for users.

A user’s ability to easily contact, in advance, other visitors to a specific city is certainly a positive development. The way it works now, if you jet off to Oslo or Stockholm for a vacation and then turn on Scruff, you are likely to find lots of local guys. That’s great, but other tourists might be likely to have more free time; they, too, are on vacation, after all. Instead of mainly looking for dinner dates and sexual companions, a user of Scruff Venture might find someone up for spending an afternoon at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo or the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Heck, you can possibly even combine the more traditional usage of Scruff with the sightseeing component: Find a buddy to visit the Erotic Museum in Amsterdam, not a bad place for a date.